Customers can now download SRSS 3 update 1 - ALPHA at the following URL:
http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=42647035
(Release Notes and Installation Guides are also available at that download site).
Sun Ray Server Software 3 Update 1 - ALPHA
Product Highlights:
==================
* Support for the Solaris 10 Operating System. For the first time Sun Ray Server Software will be available for the Solaris OS on x86 hardware for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions with Java Desktop System 3.
* Regional Hot Desking. Regional Hot Desking expands the domain of hot desking beyond a single Sun Ray fail over group. Sun has found that user performance is improved when accessing your environment remotely, if the user's Sun Ray session is hosted on a server located close to the user's home directory server, mail server and application file servers.
Update 1 adds the infrastructure to map a user's to a list of servers where the user's session should exist. The infrastructure is flexible allowing for mapping to be based on user account, smart card, and/or network options.
* Enhancements to the Administration framework. Update 1 has enhanced the Sun Ray Administration GUI to allow for the creation of a list of users capable of administering the Sun Ray failover group rather than the single login name framework of SRSS 3 and previous releases. The user's are identified by Unix login name and are authenticated through the Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) stack as any Unix user is when logging into a system. Furthermore, the administration framework has been enhanced to log the administration activities of the logged in user thereby providing an audit trail for analysis.
* Optimizations for low-latency network audio applications (including softphone VoIP). The Sun Ray audio framework has been optimized to support audio applications that depend upon low latency between end points to meet their quality of service requirements. The round trip latency between the Sun Ray and the Sun Ray server has been reduced to 80ms for LAN connected direct connected Sun Ray. Actual latency will depend upon the inherent latency of the network.
* Enhancements to device access control. SRSS 3 introduced a switch for disabling USB peripheral connectivity for security conscious sites. In Update 1 this capability has been expanded to include the serial ports introduced in the Sun Ray 170 and the internal smart card reader on all Sun Ray client types.
* Enhancements to Token Reader Administration. Token reader administration can now be done from any server in a fail over group to which the administrator and the token reader are connected. For sites that don't allow remote administration via the administration GUI, token reader administration can now be done from any server in the group. The token reader tools will now present the entire list of token readers in the failover group without concern for which server the administrator is currently logged into.
* Enhancements for Quality of Server (QoS) packet tagging. Update 1 delivers a zero administration mechanism for supporting Type of Server (ToS) network packet tagging. The Sun Ray Desktop Unit (DTU) firmware has been modified to reflect the TOS settings of incoming packets. Since the reflection of the TOS settings will be done on a stream by stream basis, it will be possible for a server to assign a different TOS value to different types of traffic between the Sun Ray and the server (TCP vs UDP).
* Enhancements to the networking configuration options for Sun Ray clients:
Incorporation of a DNS client in the firmware, which allows many values to be names rather than IP addresses.
Support for DHCP option 66 (TFTP server name) in lieu of using FWSrvr vendor option. This can resolve to a list of IP addresses, one of which is chosen randomly.
New firmware maintenance mechanism that creates *.parms files in /tftpboot (one for each model type). These are read in lieu of using the NewTVer DHCP vendor option. This allows remote firmware upgrade without DHCP access to the NewTVer value. The *.parms files contain the version, hardware revision, and barrier levels as well, so that unnecessary file reads don't happen (when the barrier would prevent writing the firmware to flash). Use of a default DNS name for the firmware server when neither option 66 nor FWSrvr is given. The name chosen is sunray-config-servers". Defining that in DNS gives a way to provide the firmware server address with no DHCP options used at all, just DNS servers and domain name.
Inclusion of "servers=< server name list >" and select=
When neither a server list nor an AltAuth list is given, the default name "sunray-servers" is looked up in DNS, and the list of IP addresses is used similarly to the AltAuth list.
* Support for the serial ports on the Sun Ray 170.
* Support for the XKB Xserver extension. This extension is required for applications that create on screen keyboards. The presence of the extension is controlled through new options to the utxconfig command.
